A blog about my landscape image making. On landscape imaging in general, bits of history and related disciplines (Architecture, Geography, Neuro Science, Philosophy and whatever happens to get my attention)

2009-07-15

Back from Corsica. Rocks #1

Each time I visit Corsica I feel a strange sense of being home. The immediate reason, I've got to think, is the presence of the (relatively) high granite mountains you see from any part of the island. I grew from the age of six to eighteen in a place, the Central Alps (Alpi Retiche), where each time I looked out of a window (of any kind) there was some high granite peak forcing my sight up in the sky. But if that was not enough it is the whole human environment that feels that way. Local people is so disturbingly unfriendly and incline to violent behaviour to remind me immediately the general model of relationship I got used to in my youth. I'm not referring here to the apparent benignly that the mountain man reserved to perfect strangers. But even in that benign look you can feel the gauge on the friend or foe relationship starting, with few exceptions, from the foe position. It may be the right suspect against any kind of invader or self acclaimed landlord, and they knew a lot of them. Oh, by the way, local inhabitants like to call it Corsica and not Corse (the French translation). But more on this on a next post.

On the geological side it happens that this island, together with Sardegna, detached from the European continent and rotated counterclockwise to assume the current position. For an exact, and problematic, explanation of the drift see the abstract here.